It should work in most languages where writing is made up of words separated by sentences. It is actually a feature that it is a pretty 'dumb' text-matching algorithm, that does not try to do anything too sophisticated with grammar or linguistics. If you look at the published research (Google scholar search for Sally Jordan and Phil Butcher) then you will see that we found that approach more effective.

Actually, we should add the links to the published papers here when we get a moment.

This Moodle 2.5 version worked fine in Moodle 2.6. However, as N. Hari spotted above, pspell is no longer available everywhere. PHP is moving in the direction of the 'enchant' spell-checking library, and I have just released a new version (for Moodle 2.5 and 2.6) where you can choose in the admin screens whether this qtype should use pspell or enchant.

Hi everyone. This is a great tool however I am having a little trouble with it and was wondering if anyone could help? It does not recognise the number '0' as a valid response. Equally, it does not accept zero as part of a statement like '0 ms-1' as a valid response. In the first case I have tried match(0) and in the second I have tried match_mow(0 ms-1). Any ideas?

On closer inspection Tim Hunt points out that another correspondent, J Hoopes, has already pointed this out to us and has suggested the solution. We're aiming to fix it for our next release in December. If you want to fix your local system before then J Hoopes sent us this

"In the pmatch_matcher_number class in the match word function, you normalize the number and then check for a tolerance. If the word to match is 0, the tolerance can't validate as 0 < 0 will always be false. so changing it to 0 <= 0 fixes the problem.""

I have tried installing this on Moodle 2.7 and it reports no spellcheck available. I have enabled the TinyMCE spell checking but doeesn't make any difference. I've searched the plugins for one. Any ideas please? I'm stumped